It works fine for me fwiw

It is very hard to maintain the profitability of a podcast. To get around adblockers, many podcasters have taken to editing the ads into the podcast before the podcast is uploaded to any platform. I suspect this may be the case for some of the instances you mention. These ads are not added by Spotify or any third party. The podcaster either does a sponsored ad-read or receives the audio/video for the ad from a sponsor and adds it to the podcast in post. Not much you can do at that point other than watch the cast on YouTube and use SponsorBlock.

You can install the Google Camera app and get those.

Where can I find links to join these? Been wondering why everything is dried up.

This sums up all of my issues perfectly!

Linux veteran here. I use Bazzite on my gaming PC and ROG Ally. Once I figured out the quirks of an immutable distro and started using distroboxes it became an amazing experience. No complaints here.